The Wisdom of Foolishness

HAS enough been said about the foolishness of friendship, — not the foolishness of being friends, but the wisdom of being sometimes foolish friends? To Maeterlinck’s saying that we cannot know each other until we dare to be silent together, one would add, and to be foolish together; for many of us hoard as gold the remembered nonsense that seemed to test our fitness for the twilight hour when hearts were uncovered and life plumbed to the depths. It is with the companion of the hour that we talk of the world, of heaven, perhaps even of ourselves; but with our friend we may be silent or absurd, with safety and profit, to both; and then in the moment of self-revelation, he helps us to see further, to judge more sanely, to know more surely, than all the masters of intellect could do.

The little jokes of a friendship are treasured through the years, and give it a vocabulary of its own. A word of flying allusion, and the ludicrous scene of a distant time comes back to give us new delight ; certain cherished stories have become familiar symbols for the happenings of a duller day: when we should do some thankless task, we say we must go nutting; or, when gay, we mention Truro Corners. So, to the uninitiated, we babble of nothing; but we, the elect, know more precisely what is meant than finest rhetoric could tell us, and dear old stories gather moss through the years until they mean not only themselves, but all that train of sunny days where they have had a part.

It is a question whether a friend is entirely beloved unless we can ‘ let ourselves go’ with him; we demand of him the intimacy of relaxation; our very soul rebels against being kept ceaselessly to any pitch, no matter how clear and sonorous the tone may be. We may admire his wit and intellectual power, we may lean upon his sympathy and sound judgment; yet it is his moment of giving way to unconsidered mirth, his sudden drop to sheer nonsense, that endears him to us. But our taste in fun must match. If your jest be dull to me, if mine be coarse to you, there is the sign-post which marks a dangerous road. And perhaps we shall find it useless to patch up a comradeship for the sake of this quality or that; for whether we will or no, we must some time travel by diverging paths where labor would be wasted trying to make a cross-cut.

And so it may all come back to the importance of foolishness as a test, — happy augury, perhaps, that in heaven the pure pleasure of companionship shall endure beyond the interchange of minds, — and it is as if some attribute of the subconscious creature marked the play of temperament that proves us kin. For mere intellect, the out put of our perishable brains, is less than nothing if ourselves be not even cousins-german. And what havoc we may make when a close relationship is founded chiefly upon a likeness of intellectual tastes! One day the bound is crossed to the spirit’s domain, when the chance is that warring temperaments wreck the light fabric, and we go forth cursing the brains that tricked us into hailing an alien as our own.

With this friend we may be serious, with another gay; one ponders upon life and art, while the other, charming playmate of an hour, is full of quip and jest. But the ideal friend must have a light touch and a stride that mates with ours, and it is his life and ours, viewed by the light of universal day, which bespeaks his interest. And then perhaps a pretty atmosphere of fun creates a glamour where the best of us may bloom. By the flash of his wit, he shows us our highest reach, and in the mild warmth of his humor, where there can be no blight of self-appraising, we grow and thrive. So it may not be all idleness, but like the sparkle of tiny waves on a sunny day it marks the steady progress of the tide.

There should be a tolerance in friendship that gives us room, a very lack of demanding that we be this or that which makes it natural to do our prettiest. And when we know we have been cowards, when we know we have gone down a step or two, to be met by some gentle jest instead of the rebuke we had richly earned melts our ready defiance, and we are eager to climb again to that place near him which we had left. He has not told us that we have fallen below his hope, he would not affront friendship by anything so crude as spoken forgiveness; but in that exquisite ignoring of the hurt, we recognize our chance. We know in the depths we are at one; but diversity of fancy, the light sparring of contending wit, may weave a fabric that gives color to our day, and it is often the whimsical side of an affection which makes its charm. Here is the pleasant garden which lies about the solid structure of our friendship, where we may play with poppy dolls and burdock cradles, while we know the sheltering roof is near when we would have the quiet of shaded rooms or refuge from the storm.